Recently, a lot of applications have been provided to create documents for various purposes on a computer. A user uses different applications according to purposes, such as an application suitable for creation of a document, an application suitable for creation of a graphic and an application suitable for editing of image data. However, there may be a case where a document desired by a user may include a page with a lot of text, a page with a lot of graphics to be used for presentation, or a page on which image data such as a picture is processed and it is more efficient to create such a page with a different application.
Accordingly, in order to create an intended document which includes various kinds of data, the user must cause respective various applications to print data with the use of the print function provided for the applications and combine printed matters in a desired order to obtain the desired document. This presents problems that the operational burden is imposed on the user and that wasteful printing is performed.
Accordingly, in a mechanism disclosed in Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-91384), there is provided a technique for converting multiple documents generated by different applications into a common intermediate format on a computer to treat them as one document. By using this mechanism, it is possible to obtain an intended document which includes multiple kinds of data only by performing operations on a computer as an electronic document.
In a system of Patent Document 1, it is also commonly performed to convert document data created by application software on a PC to electronic data not dependent on the application which has created the document data and output it from a printing apparatus after adding processing instructions such as double-sided printing, stapling and punching instructions. Furthermore, in a conventional document processing system, it is also performed to combine pages of image data generated by reading with a scanner and pages of inputted electronic data, store the combination as an electronic document, add processing instructions, such as double-sided printing, stapling and punching instruction, and output the electronic document from a printing apparatus.
Meanwhile, in the printing industry, variable printing is performed in which data is replaced according to customers for printing. The variable printing is a printing method generally used for address printing and the like, in which printing is performed by replacing address data from a database (database records) according to customers. In such variable printing, an output matter (printed matter) is obtained by combining (overlaying) a layout template and data from the database.
An application for performing such variable printing is also disclosed in Patent Document 2 (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-122837). According to a mechanism in Patent Document 2, a form template can be created by a form creation application, and by associating each field of this form template with data in a database, it is possible to read data from a corresponding data field of multiple records in the database and generate print data corresponding to necessary records.
However, though the form application of the Patent Document 2 is provided with a variable printing function, it only outputs rendering data for each page to a printer driver when printing is performed, similarly to an ordinary application. Therefore, the concept of a record of the variable printing has been lost when print data is generated. For example, if printing of three records is performed when a form template (also referred to as a variable template) is configured by three pages, then three pages are printed for each record, and therefore, print data corresponding to nine pages are generated as a whole. By printing the print data with a printing apparatus, printed matters corresponding to the three records can be obtained as a result. However, there is not an attribute indicating with which page a record ends, in the print data.
Therefore, in the case of a system which receives a document created by any application as a print output from the application and converts it to a file in its own format like a print setting application (also referred to as a bookbinding application) of Patent Document 1 (for example, PDF Writer by Adobe Corporation is similar to this system), the received output data is managed as one document in this system because the concept of a record does not exist in the output data. For example, in the above case, the document is acquired as one document with nine pages. Therefore, if printing is performed with a printing apparatus from this system, the document is printed as one document with nine pages. When attempting to perform print processing of the document of the second record created by the form creation application, from the print setting application, the user must visually recognize a portion of pages corresponding to the second record and manually instruct printing of the recognized page range.
Furthermore, as described above, in the case of managing a document configured by multiple chapters when a document unit acquired from an application at one time is assumed to be one chapter, operations will be more complicated, and it is conceivable that printing may be impossible by the mechanism of Patent Document 1 which permits printing for each chapter but does not permit printing only of particular pages of a chapter. For example, there is a problem that, if a document created by the form creation application has been acquired into the second chapter, and documents corresponding to the first and third chapters have been acquired by another application, it is not possible to instruct printing of the first chapter, pages corresponding to the second record of the second chapter, and the third chapter to be performed in that order.
Even if it is attempted to apply the variable printing to the conventional document processing system described above and process a template file used in the variable printing, it is not possible to perform editing processing in which the concept of variable printing is introduced because the concept of a database record does not exist in the conventional document processing system.
Furthermore, when printing is performed after making print settings in the conventional document processing system, it is not possible to obtain printed matters for each record because the concept of a database record does not exist in the document processing system.